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Yesterday, I posted photos of my front porch home office on my tech blog Global Nerdy. The porch is my home office for the duration of social distancing. Anitra also works from home, and since her work requires her to be in teleconference meetings way more than mine, she has a much greater claim to the home office. Besides, Florida is lovely in March, and the view is spectacular!

I’ve seen a number of Facebook posts asking people to post the nth photo from their phone‘s camera roll, usually as a way to get a break from all the COVID-19 news. I thought I’d offer some photos to help.

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I was a remote worker for nine years, from October 2008 to 2017. As a result, I’ve developed a bag of tricks and techniques to be effective while not working in person at an office. One of them is to not work in pajamas, but to do “the three S’s” and dress up. Tampa’s climate is well-suited to my collection of short-sleeved, button-up shirts, aloha shirts, and guayaberas. Shirts are my thing as much as scarves are my sister’s thing.

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Where I work — Lilypad — the development team has a daily stand-up meeting every morning. For those of you who aren’t familiar with agile practices, a daily stand-up is a short meeting where the members of a team take turns telling the others what they accomplished yesterday, the tasks they plan to take on today, and if there are any impediments in their way. It helps to ensure that the team know what’s going on, and it helps keep them coordinated.

Akira, our scrum master (an agile team facilitator) is ill, and when that happens, I step in as Pretend Scrum Master. We’ve been holding the daily stand-up remotely via Google Hangouts, and I’ve been doing it with video as I stand in our front yard. It makes for a lovely backdrop.

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Have a happy and productive Friday!

More details here, from the paper of a somewhat different record.

On Sunday, I wrote about my sister, Dr. Eileen deVilla, who is the Medical Officer for Health for the City of Toronto. Simply put, she’s the head of public health for Canada’s largest city and economic capital. This is a big responsibility, and with the COVID-19 pandemic, the work she does in coordinating the effort to combat the spread of COVID-19 is literally a matter of life and death.

I know this from my own experience as a developer evangelist: doing good work is important, but doing it in style gets the work noticed. Our Mom is a sharp dresser and so was Dad, and it’s a lesson that we both took to heart. For me, it’s nice shirts and the accordion, and for Eileen, it’s splendiferous scarves. At every news conference — and she’s been doing one daily for the past little while — she wears a different scarf.

Someone’s noticed the scarves and started a fan Twitter account — Dr. de Villa’s Scarf, or @de_scarf:

Let’s show my sister some love and appreciation for the work she does — let’s get that account past two thousand followers. Follow it now!

Also worth checking out

Want to see Eileen in action? There are plenty of videos featuring her on the City of Toronto’s channel of COVID-19 news releases, which I’ve included below.

Tuesday, March 12

Friday, March 13

Monday, March 16

Tuesday, March 17

Wednesday, March 18

Thursday, March 19

Hunkering down for a hurricane means staying indoors, hunkering down in your house’s designated safe room (the innermost room with the fewest windows, or better yet, without any windows), keeping all interior doors shut, losing power and eventually the food in your fridge and freezer from spoilage, and wind and flood damage.

Compared to all that, social distancing and sheltering in place, with working power, air conditioning, internet, running water, and being able to go outside (as long as we maintain distance) is a cakewalk.

“All I’m sayin’ is that if it does a good job scraping chocolate pudding out of the bowl…”

Do you know what will get us through the COVID-19 crisis? A combination of smarts, courage, strength, and compassion — all qualities exemplified by the First Family of Superhero Comics: The Fantastic Four!

If you know them only through the movies, you can be forgiven for thinking that they’re not all that interesting a team. The 2005 film (Fantastic Four) and its 2007 sequel (Rise of the Silver Surfer) were in the lower tier of what a film with Marvel characters could be in the pre-Iron Man era, and the 2015 remake was even more disappointing.

Both were still better than the 1994 Roger Corman film, which was made only to fulfill a contractual requirement to hold on to the film rights for the characters. Want to know how bad it was? Here’s the trailer:

Here’s a great (if long — an hour and fifty minutes!) video that a long-overdue look at the Fantastic Four, their history, and how their book changed the world of comics. When they debuted in 1961, superheroes were cardboard characters in spandex, and the Four were imperfect, slightly dysfunctional, error-prone, and squabbled with each other almost as much as they fought supervillains. They were deeper characters — and they were a family.

While you’re stuck at home, practicing social distancing, go and watch this documentary — which is also a sort of love letter — about the Fantastic Four. It’s probably the best analysis of these characters and their story I’ve ever seen (and I spent a lot of  my youth at Toronto’s Silver Snail reading Marvel comics). Not only is it well-researched, but it’s well-produced, and there’s some great voice acting, too: